Is OpenNTF In Danger Of Jumping The Shark
Tuesday, May 12, 2009 12:03 PM
Back in January at Lotusphere there was a huge cheer when, during the opening general session, it was announced that IBM would be providing some resources to and partnering with OpenNTF. It is something that many in the notes community, especially those who have active projects on OpenNTF have been vocal about in the past and the announcement looked like IBM were going to listen to what the people wanted and help out.
Todays [announcement] and OpenNTF redesign, however, makes me feel that OpenNTF has lost some of it's roots and is dangerously close to heading in the wrong direction and alienating the very developers that made it successful.
I like the idea of the catalog of high quality applications but right now it just contains IBM projects. There are plenty of other OpenNTF projects that deserved to be in the catalog from day one including, but not limited to, the OpenNTF Mail Experience, !!HELP!!, Vacation Requests, OpenLog and even my own BlogSphere project. Right now all I am seeing is self promotion of IBM projects. This is something that needs to be rectified quickly before people visiting the site just see if as a repository for IBM sanctioned templates.
And what exactly is OpenNTF all about, well in my mind the main reason for OpenNTF are the different projects but they seem to have taken a back seat to the catalog, yes there are plenty of 'half finished' projects in there, they need to be weeded out but definitely not forgotten about. Some of those projects contain some great code that could help somebody out. The active projects need to be brought back out to the homepage for the site, not just the list of catalog items. These are the guts of OpenNTF and the projects are what made OpenNTF work. Hopefully somebody somewhere is working on a redesign of this area and will incorporate all the ideas that have been mentioned in the IdeaJam area.
My biggest issue however is the red tape that has sprung up. If I want to 'commit' new code for something like BlogSphere I'm first going to have to get [written consent] from my employer. If anybody out there wants to contribute some code for Blogsphere to me then I'm going to have to do my own due diligence to make sure that your authorized by your employer to submit the code and that you in fact own the code your submitting to me. I know this is all cover your backside sort of stuff but this sort of change should have been discussed with ALL the current project owners on OpenNTF.
And lets not forget the license, No more using any license other the Apache Public License V2 except with express permission of the new steering committee. Not not all open source licenses are the same. Did you know that under the Apache V2 license anybody can take your code from OpenNTF, make modifications and then patent their changes and sell the modified code as part of their products as long as they include the attributions and original license document, whereas GPL or LGPL states that they can only distribute the modified work if the distribution is also a GPL'd or LGPL'd. My take on this is that by forcing the Apache license IBM can then selectively include certain templates from OpenNTF in the next release of Notes/Domino if they meet certain standards. How would you feel if a business partner redistributed the top 50 projects on OpenNTF as 'The New Nifty Fifty' and made a profit on it. Is this something that project managers would like to see happen? IS the restriction of the Open Source license to APL V2 a good thing or a bad thing?
OpenNTF has been a great resource since it's conception, From it's humble beginnings as NotesOSS with a single project based on the mail template till today, OpenNTF has attracted some brilliant ideas and developers but all this could easily be lost if the new steering committee is not careful.
So I have one message to the members of the new steering committee... Don't forget who OpenNTF is for and what it's original purpose was. You are in a position of trust and you can either steer the site back onto a path of collaborative development or you can steer it over the edge of a cliff into obscurity and red tape. A group of 10 people in a steering committee does not make a website, it's the users of the site that make the difference.
-------------
And to any commenter who wants to say that if I don't like the changes I could just pull my projects from the site, I say this... Yes I could and who knows it might have to come to that, but there is a committee of 10 people, many of whom will see this blog entry and with luck many of them will read it, take the concerns on board and rectify what they can and get things back on track before they lose the heart of the developer community. I can only hope the steering committee are in this for the right reason and not just so they can advertise their corporate logos at the bottom on the OpenNTF website.